Disclaimer: While I am a lawyer, this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice on this or other topics, contact an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
There's a trademark issue here, too. Someone owned a domain name, while someone else used that name to build up a recognized entity, distributed worldwide.
Who owns the trademark? The domain holder, the intellectual property holder, or a combination of the two? I could make arguments for all three, barring an enforceable agreement between the two of them.
And if it's the IP holder, did he abandon the trademark by switching to kernel notes?
Barring the agreement, this isn't clear cut. Unless the answer is "solely the domain owner," any purchasor of the domain might be unable to use it for a page of the same name . . .
Price had nothing to do with my buying linux. Not just a minor factor, but *absolutely* nothing to do with my choice. LyX (which I also would happily pay for, but instead occasionaly code for) is simply hands-down better then any of the alternatives on other platforms, and more than makes up for not being able to run quicken (the only thing I want that isn't easily findable. OK, and a decent spreadsheet, but try finding one of those since excel 4.0 stopped shipping . ..).
I buy hardware. I buy software. If something better is available at no cost, of course I'll use it instead. If quicken isn't a disaster by the time they port it, I'll be first in line (though looking at the trends for products, I'm more likely to buy a mac emulator to run version 1 or 2:).
But I'm not likely to buy a browser. I still use netscape 3; 4.0 and later are too much trouble and missing useful features. And the only reason I use it instead of lynx is that it can pop open extra windows from links. I very rarely have a use for graphics--basically reading comics, whiyh pop-up with xv from lynx, and have none at all for java and javascript. And lynx' cookie handling is much better; junkbuster is unneeded. Once I have a couple of spare hours, I'll patch lynx to do this.
But the point is that, yes, the majority of the potential user base will pay for software. There is certainly the High Church of Emacs, which won't use anything that isn't GPL, or can't be assimilated by the GPL, but these are a minority now, and will become a smaller minority as linux actually gets purchased for the desktop--into the hands of people who have proved they're willing to pay for software, and will already have paid for linux.
R-12 was banned (and all leave the debates about whether the science involved was schlocky enough to toss it to other sites:).
We now get R134a, which transfers substantially less heat. Don't convert your old R-12 a/c units unless you have to; post-conversion, they don't cool as much. You need a heat exchanger about 50% larger to get the same amount of cooling, and there just isn't room for this in your car. Mercedes switched early, and the result (at least if you lived in the desert) was a $60k car that couldn't cool itself down to comfortable temps . . .
Also, R134a has a nasty tendency that R12 didn't--under the right conditions, it can explode. Some time back, i read a snide op-ed piece suggesting an exploding refridgerator as the new symbol for the extreme-fringe of the environmentalists:)
only with fundamental changes
on
Corel Linux FAQ
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· Score: 2
would your scenario be possible. Linux installations offer a choice of what to install; it wouldn't be a matter of uninstalling it, but of not choosing to install it in the first place.
Caldera is not interested in selling linux. They are coming up with the distribution so that they can sell their regular products. They are doing exactly what netscape should have done two years ago--spin a linux distribution to bundle with the browser, and contribute the work to finish wine.
It is quite clear from caldera's statement that if there's actually demand for it, that they'll sell their version of linux separately.
Also, given that they're going to be using debian as a base, they will be thoroughly infected with the GPL; only completely independent portions that they design could possibly be proprietary, and the rest could be sold or otherwise distributed by anyone else.
I'm really not sure why I'm bothering to explain this, as I'm pretty sure that this is just a troll . . .
Re:Forced loading on netscape
on
Slashdot Tweaks
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ahh, thanks. I'm happily running 3 again. First I downloaded it, then told the port to make itself so I could figure out where to stick the tarball, but now FreeBSD is happily downloading from the archives again through a nammed account.
But I'd probably have not tried again for months without this information.
star trek episodes from either star trek or these 3-letter knockoffs in which the enterprise *wasn't* captured, taken over by hostile enitity, taken over by hostile computer, abandoned, told to self-destruct, or otherwise removed or nearly removed from control of the captain & crew.
These guys shouldn't be permitted shields, let alone phasers & torpedoes:)
On version 4, sort of. Previous versions made it an window-by-window option; 4 and later make it a global option, so all window must act the same. It's one of the reasons I stuck with 3.0 (but i can't on this new freebsd install, becasue archive.netscape.com is no longer open to anonymous access), while the other was the alt- to go back by that number of pages.
but not enough to get blinked at :)
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Slashdot Tweaks
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· Score: 2
I generally don't bother blocking ads, but I set junkbuster to hit anything that blinks at me; it drives me nuts, and I've seen it bring this k6/200 to it's knees, doing nothing but blinking.
I'd edit the binary of netscape, but there's the ocasional animation I want to see.
>However, if we can assume for the moment that >things are similar in the UK as they are in the >US (specifically a highly litigous society that is >grasping at straws trying to shoehorn emerging >technologies into outdated laws very >inconsitantly) it makes perfect sense.
Sounds like it's a single litgious individual, who is already litigating. Under the circumstances, I don't see what choice they had other than betting the farm on what the law is ultimately decided to be . . .
>the kernel "panics" and tries to kill everything >nicely and sync up but it well, never works right
But of course. If it was in a condition to do it right, it probably wouldn't have to panic:) So it tries to do what it can, and hopes that that's better than nothing.
But it was different then. You didn't just move a jumper or two. You replaced crystals, or got exotic & built a variable speed oscillator. And you had to to be careful of which parts could run fast, and which needed to keep their timing so the video would display. And Zilog noted on intorduction that the rated speed was 2.5, but that hand-picked units might run at 4, and that a Z80A that *would* run at 4 would be along soon.
>Why doesn't anyone form a suit against these >lawyers for misuse of the legal system?
It's kind of tough when what they're doing is perfectly legal, and they "win" by getting a settlement.
But one of my pipe dreams is a class action against the so-called trial lawyers, the personal injury plaintiffs' bar. While it is normally the plaintiffs that form a class, it is also possible to form the defendants into a class.
And the tort? Warning labels. The silly warning labels have become so prevalent that they are ignored, eliminating the value of serious warning labels. So find people who have been injured by not reading warnings that would have been useful to normal people . . .
It's not from the plaintiffss' bar, but as an example: earplugs/ear protectors are required on constructions sites near certain equipment--because the mandated sound levels of the back-up beeps exceed the permissible levels for the sound. Hmm, and since people wear the sound-blockers, maybe we need to make the signals louder . . .
hawk, esq., who thinks the warning label on McDonald's coffe should read, "Only a low grade moron would hold this cup with her upper thighs and remove the lid in a moving vehicle."
Disclaimer: I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you need advice on this matter for yourself, see an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
This is a fairly typical class-action settlement.
The underlying claim will strike most people familiar with the issue as silly. In all seriousness, how many people in the US took a 56k for the exact speed of 7kBytes/second? 3? 5? They diddn't buy it for a particular data rate, but for being the fastest available.
And the defense: This looks like one more that the defense would win after fighting. BUt it comes down to:
The settlement: coupons, and pay off the plaintiff lawyers. Coupons are becoming an increasingly common way of handling nuisance class action suits. There have been rumors in the past of manufacture trying to rummage up suits for this very purpose. It either locks in the consumer to buy from the same manufacturor, or it doesn't cost anything.
That is, it doesn't directly cost anything. Switching hats briefly, and speaking as an economist, this drives up prices by distorting the demand for the product. Class members pay less than they otherwise would have, but everyone else pays more. As a corrollary, the net settlement ot the consumer is less than $15, as the $15 relates to the new higher price.
Since they could win, why does the manufacturor settle? Quite simply, it's cheaper. Instead of the legal costs of fie years of litigation, the depression of the stock price from having to report the litigation in reports, and the general effects of "consumer advocates" screaming, the company cuts a bunch of coupons, and pays hush money to the plaintiff lawyers. (MY civil procedure professor referred to these suits as a great way to get paid just for going away).
The reason that class action suits exist is the notion that they are an effective way of handling suits that are too small to bring individually, and that they cut down on the required judicial resources--it's not worth suing a major corporation ofer $100.
On the other hand, when the damage per consumer is less than forty cents, it makes no sense to worry about the matter. So the system gives them a ten cent coupon, and their lawyers a couple of million.
The only class action that I know of that has actually benefitted people who were actually injured was the Iomega settlement, in which Iomega paid rebates that it had wrongfully withheld--and in full (plus a disk). TYpically, the payment to class members is negligible, or the connection to the alleged injury spurious (e.g., the breast implant litigation).
In practice, iomega excepted, the only beneficiaries of the class action system are the attorneys who feed from it.
I should first note that the first clone was not a surprise; compaq licensed the bios for their first luggable.
that aside, what made microchannel a non-starter was the licensing terms: Royalties not only on microchannel machines, but on all past machines using the AT bus. For some reason, noone found that extra royalty payment desirable:)
was why IBM didn't start an all-out blitz when windows 95 was delayed. It could run the existing w3.1 programs, and multiple dos programs. But instead, ibm chose to wait and add more features. The market was their plum waiting to be plucked, and they decided to plant another tree, instead. This gave MS the time to impose another api that os2 couldn't emulate, and ended the game.
I'm going through one of my cyclic fits where I yank linux for freebsd, and don't have newsposting working yet. So I tried dejanews, but they seem to have removed threaded reading in their latest "update" (I *defy* you to read alt.folklore.computers without threading). So I cringed and tried remarq again (cringing because last time I tried, it kept failing and feeding me pages about what to change on IIis to fix its problem, when it gave me anything). It is no longer possible to retrieve a message with junkbuster active--you're given the page pof most recent articles whatever you do. Turn off junkbuster, and it loads. Somehow, it's detecting the proxy and refusing to function. And there's now way I'm letting doubleclick set cookies and flash blinkies at me . . .
and it doesn't help that changing the blockfile seems to trigger linux-netscape (the only one i could get to work at all) to crash on freebsd . . .
So I suppose I just wait a few days until i figure out posting . . .
>You mean that the ad for non-surgical lyposuction >is an idea that needs protection?
I don't have to--the United States Supreme Court already did. As an attorney i think that the doctrine of "commercial free speech" is one of (but not the) worst to come out of the court in its history, but it'ss there. It came up in the context of lawyer advertising, which virtually every bar association and licensing authority banned. It is now permitted over their objections.
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. I am probably not admitted in your jurisdiction. If you need advice on this topic, see a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction.
That said, IBM's version of MS's behavior (assuming the truth of it for the moment) is about as illegal as it gets.
*Having* a monopoly is not illegal, unless you got it in an illegal manner. The original microsoft mnopoly was lawfully acquired by most counts, and owes more to IBM pricing CP/M-86 at four times the price of PC-DOS than to anything Microsoft did.
However, having legally acquired a monopoly, it is illegal to use market power for just about anything. ANd one does not have to be a monopolist to reach this prohibition, but merely to have market power. Here (again, assuming that it is true), they attempted to use a near-monopoly to eliminate a competitor. This creates two great sins against anti-trust law: 1) the use of the power, and 2) it is an *attempt* to monopolize, an offense on its own.
It is possible to make economic arguments that what MS has done is good for the consumer, and that the law *should* permit the alleged behavior. THere have been several of these as op-ed pieces in the wall street journal over the past few months, and generally rely on the notion that microsoft is innovative.
I haven't been persuaded by the arguments, but they can be honestly made. However, that is not what the law *is*. While antitrust law gives the courts far more flexibility than just about any other statutory law, and modern antitrust law acknowledges consumer interest rather than protection of competitors as the ultimate test, the definitions needed to permit the alleged behavior not only bend the meaning of the statutes, but requires that they be outright ignored.
To extend this analogy, go back further, to when the ibm pc was new. Microsoft *was* the good guy, who was going to save us from the dominion of IBM.
Microsoft sold MS-DOS for other computers, so that you could run man (later almost all) of the programs for the IBM on other 8086 hardware. In 1982, it was ibm that was seen as the dark side.
IBM *expected* you to buy ibm software to run on that pc, and only ibm hardware--though they couldn't force you. We had a *wall* full of ibm software for it, but I don't remember ever selling a single copy of it (mainly because it wasn't any good).
With MS-DOS, though, you were safe, and could by someone else's hardware. In 1982, this didn't mean a clone, either. There were several other 8086 machines out there. And the 640k limit was peculiar to ibm (and the clones); iirc, Victor could access 768k.
But along the way, things changed. Someone through young Microft through a Window, disfiguring it horribly, and creating the dreaded Micrso~1 . . .
Now we see the emperor, err, ibm, coming to our rescue to protect us from microso~1 . . .
>But wouldn't it just be like having offspring >when one is older in life.
That's the crux of it, I think. Where I see the problem is that that 70 year old started out with "correct" material to form the gametes, and "corrects" to that. But the clone doesn't get that, so do the sexual organs correct to the right value, or do the correct to what they started with?
The article claims that she started with over-aged cells, and thus "inherits" this agge, but that her offspring would be normal. But would they? This would require some type of "repair" of here gametes, as her ovaries will have been formed from the wrong "age" of cells. Even presuming something about ovaries and testes that avoids the general agin effect, might this only fix cells to the age of those (normally a couple of days) forming the organs?
I don't know; moderation happens fast . . .
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>As of last friday, I noticed that posts starting >at higher than one was still happening.
The post to which you were replying, for example, was up to 5 in less than 5 minuts, I believe.
we still have the problem with the path. If I have a connection from San Jose to Reno, it's not relevant to Atlanta to Charleston traffic. However, if I have electricty in San Jose, I can feed it to the grid, allowing more to be drawn off in Charleston.
We can still define it as a commodity, but it's a much "tighter" definition than we'd like to use.
Gas is nice & loose: 1000 cubic feet by friday. It can be stored if necessary
Electricty gets tighter; while gas at 2pm and 3pm are close to fungible (interchangable & indistinguishable), electricty at 2pm friday and 3pm friday are distinct products. Still, since there's a huge grid to work with, and we can push the electricty back and forth, the market can work.
But bandwidth is an issue of San Jose to Reno at 2pm. While there are limits on how much each path can carry for electricity, the power itself is the dominant factor. But with bandwidth, it's that ability to carry that's the issue. I could route traffic from San Jose to Atlanta to Charleston and back to Reno, but it's hard for that connection to compete with a direct one.
is what I see as the real problem. The rest gets computationally expensive, but workable. But you still have a single connection to the pool, and are stuck with that monopoly, which can collect the economic rents that the ISP might have in the past. I don't see this as solving the issue, just partially mitigating it--and adding the complexity that you descrbie (quite well, I might add) as an additional cost.
Not all of them, but the bulk of tehm. And you described exactly the reasons that catholics & noncatholics alike took pay cuts to teach at my jesuit high school.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: While I am a lawyer, this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice on this or other topics, contact an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
There's a trademark issue here, too. Someone owned a domain name, while someone else used that name to build up a recognized entity, distributed worldwide.
Who owns the trademark? The domain holder, the intellectual property holder, or a combination of the two? I could make arguments for all three, barring an enforceable agreement between the two of them.
And if it's the IP holder, did he abandon the trademark by switching to kernel notes?
Barring the agreement, this isn't clear cut. Unless the answer is "solely the domain owner," any purchasor of the domain might be unable to use it for a page of the same name . . .
Price had nothing to do with my buying linux. Not just a minor factor, but *absolutely* nothing to do with my choice. LyX (which I also would happily pay for, but instead occasionaly code for) is simply hands-down better then any of the alternatives on other platforms, and more than makes up for not being able to run quicken (the only thing I want that isn't easily findable. OK, and a decent spreadsheet, but try finding one of those since excel 4.0 stopped shipping . . .).
:).
I buy hardware. I buy software. If something better is available at no cost, of course I'll use it instead. If quicken isn't a disaster by the time they port it, I'll be first in line (though looking at the trends for products, I'm more likely to buy a mac emulator to run version 1 or 2
But I'm not likely to buy a browser. I still use netscape 3; 4.0 and later are too much trouble and missing useful features. And the only reason I use it instead of lynx is that it can pop open extra windows from links. I very rarely have a use for graphics--basically reading comics, whiyh pop-up with xv from lynx, and have none at all for java and javascript. And lynx' cookie handling is much better; junkbuster is unneeded. Once I have a couple of spare hours, I'll patch lynx to do this.
But the point is that, yes, the majority of the potential user base will pay for software. There is certainly the High Church of Emacs, which won't use anything that isn't GPL, or can't be assimilated by the GPL, but these are a minority now, and will become a smaller minority as linux actually gets purchased for the desktop--into the hands of people who have proved they're willing to pay for software, and will already have paid for linux.
R-12 was banned (and all leave the debates about whether the science involved was schlocky enough to toss it to other sites :).
:)
We now get R134a, which transfers substantially less heat. Don't convert your old R-12 a/c units unless you have to; post-conversion, they don't cool as much. You need a heat exchanger about 50% larger to get the same amount of cooling, and there just isn't room for this in your car. Mercedes switched early, and the result (at least if you lived in the desert) was a $60k car that couldn't cool itself down to comfortable temps . . .
Also, R134a has a nasty tendency that R12 didn't--under the right conditions, it can explode. Some time back, i read a snide op-ed piece suggesting an exploding refridgerator as the new symbol for the extreme-fringe of the environmentalists
would your scenario be possible. Linux installations offer a choice of what to install; it wouldn't be a matter of uninstalling it, but of not choosing to install it in the first place.
Caldera is not interested in selling linux. They are coming up with the distribution so that they can sell their regular products. They are doing exactly what netscape should have done two years ago--spin a linux distribution to bundle with the browser, and contribute the work to finish wine.
It is quite clear from caldera's statement that if there's actually demand for it, that they'll sell their version of linux separately.
Also, given that they're going to be using debian as a base, they will be thoroughly infected with the GPL; only completely independent portions that they design could possibly be proprietary, and the
rest could be sold or otherwise distributed by anyone else.
I'm really not sure why I'm bothering to explain this, as I'm pretty sure that this is just a troll . . .
ahh, thanks. I'm happily running 3 again. First I downloaded it, then told the port to make itself so I could figure out where to stick the tarball, but now FreeBSD is happily downloading from the archives again through a nammed account.
But I'd probably have not tried again for months without this information.
star trek episodes from either star trek or these 3-letter knockoffs in which the enterprise *wasn't* captured, taken over by hostile enitity, taken over by hostile computer, abandoned, told to self-destruct, or otherwise removed or nearly removed from control of the captain & crew.
:)
These guys shouldn't be permitted shields, let alone phasers & torpedoes
On version 4, sort of. Previous versions made it an window-by-window option; 4 and later make it a global option, so all window must act the same. It's one of the reasons I stuck with 3.0 (but i can't on this new freebsd install, becasue archive.netscape.com is no longer open to anonymous access), while the other was the alt- to go back by that number of pages.
I generally don't bother blocking ads, but I set junkbuster to hit anything that blinks at me; it drives me nuts, and I've seen it bring this k6/200 to it's knees, doing nothing but blinking.
I'd edit the binary of netscape, but there's the ocasional animation I want to see.
>However, if we can assume for the moment that
>things are similar in the UK as they are in the
>US (specifically a highly litigous society that is
>grasping at straws trying to shoehorn emerging
>technologies into outdated laws very
>inconsitantly) it makes perfect sense.
Sounds like it's a single litgious individual, who is already litigating. Under the circumstances, I don't see what choice they had other than betting the farm on what the law is ultimately decided to be . . .
>the kernel "panics" and tries to kill everything
:) So it tries to do what it can, and hopes that that's better than nothing.
>nicely and sync up but it well, never works right
But of course. If it was in a condition to do it right, it probably wouldn't have to panic
6Mhz? never heard of pulling that off.
But it was different then. You didn't just move a jumper or two. You replaced crystals, or got exotic & built a variable speed oscillator. And you had to to be careful of which parts could run fast, and which needed to keep their timing so the video would display. And Zilog noted on intorduction that the rated speed was 2.5, but that hand-picked units might run at 4, and that a Z80A that *would* run at 4 would be along soon.
>Why doesn't anyone form a suit against these
>lawyers for misuse of the legal system?
It's kind of tough when what they're doing is perfectly legal, and they "win" by getting a settlement.
But one of my pipe dreams is a class action against the so-called trial lawyers, the personal injury plaintiffs' bar. While it is normally the plaintiffs that form a class, it is also possible to form the defendants into a class.
And the tort? Warning labels. The silly warning labels have become so prevalent that they are ignored, eliminating the value of serious warning labels. So find people who have been injured by not reading warnings that would have been useful to normal people . . .
It's not from the plaintiffss' bar, but as an example: earplugs/ear protectors are required on constructions sites near certain equipment--because the mandated sound levels of the back-up beeps exceed the permissible levels for the sound. Hmm, and since people wear the sound-blockers, maybe we need to make the signals louder . . .
hawk, esq., who thinks the warning label on McDonald's coffe should read, "Only a low grade moron would hold this cup with her upper thighs and remove the lid in a moving vehicle."
Disclaimer: I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you need advice on this matter for yourself, see an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
This is a fairly typical class-action settlement.
The underlying claim will strike most people familiar with the issue as silly. In all seriousness, how many people in the US took a 56k for the exact speed of 7kBytes/second? 3? 5? They diddn't buy it for a particular data rate, but for being the fastest available.
And the defense: This looks like one more that the defense would win after fighting. BUt it comes down to:
The settlement: coupons, and pay off the plaintiff lawyers. Coupons are becoming an increasingly common way of handling nuisance class action suits. There have been rumors in the past of manufacture trying to rummage up suits for this very purpose. It either locks in the consumer to buy from the same manufacturor, or it doesn't cost anything.
That is, it doesn't directly cost anything. Switching hats briefly, and speaking as an economist, this drives up prices by distorting the demand for the product. Class members pay less than they otherwise would have, but everyone else pays more. As a corrollary, the net settlement ot the consumer is less than $15, as the $15 relates to the new higher price.
Since they could win, why does the manufacturor settle? Quite simply, it's cheaper. Instead of the legal costs of fie years of litigation, the depression of the stock price from having to report the litigation in reports, and the general effects of "consumer advocates" screaming, the company cuts a bunch of coupons, and pays hush money to the plaintiff lawyers. (MY civil procedure professor referred to these suits as a great way to get paid just for going away).
The reason that class action suits exist is the notion that they are an effective way of handling suits that are too small to bring individually, and that they cut down on the required judicial resources--it's not worth suing a major corporation ofer $100.
On the other hand, when the damage per consumer is less than forty cents, it makes no sense to worry about the matter. So the system gives them a ten cent coupon, and their lawyers a couple of million.
The only class action that I know of that has actually benefitted people who were actually injured was the Iomega settlement, in which Iomega paid rebates that it had wrongfully withheld--and in full (plus a disk). TYpically, the payment to class members is negligible, or the connection to the alleged injury spurious (e.g., the breast implant litigation).
In practice, iomega excepted, the only beneficiaries of the class action system are the attorneys who feed from it.
I should first note that the first clone was not a surprise; compaq licensed the bios for their first luggable.
:)
that aside, what made microchannel a non-starter was the licensing terms: Royalties not only on microchannel machines, but on all past machines using the AT bus. For some reason, noone found that extra royalty payment desirable
was why IBM didn't start an all-out blitz when windows 95 was delayed. It could run the existing w3.1 programs, and multiple dos programs. But instead, ibm chose to wait and add more features. The market was their plum waiting to be plucked, and they decided to plant another tree, instead. This gave MS the time to impose another api that os2 couldn't emulate, and ended the game.
I'm going through one of my cyclic fits where I yank linux for freebsd, and don't have newsposting working yet. So I tried dejanews, but they seem to have removed threaded reading in their latest "update" (I *defy* you to read alt.folklore.computers without threading). So I cringed and tried remarq again (cringing because last time I tried, it kept failing and feeding me pages about what to change on IIis to fix its problem, when it gave me anything). It is no longer possible to retrieve a message with junkbuster active--you're given the page pof most recent articles whatever you do. Turn off junkbuster, and it loads. Somehow, it's detecting the proxy and refusing to function. And there's now way I'm letting doubleclick set cookies and flash blinkies at me . . .
and it doesn't help that changing the blockfile seems to trigger linux-netscape (the only one i could get to work at all) to crash on freebsd . . .
So I suppose I just wait a few days until i figure out posting . . .
>You mean that the ad for non-surgical lyposuction
>is an idea that needs protection?
I don't have to--the United States Supreme Court already did. As an attorney i think that the doctrine of "commercial free speech" is one of (but not the) worst to come out of the court in its history, but it'ss there. It came up in the context of lawyer advertising, which virtually every bar association and licensing authority banned. It is now permitted over their objections.
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. I am probably not admitted in your jurisdiction. If you need advice on this topic, see a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction.
That said, IBM's version of MS's behavior (assuming the truth of it for the moment) is about as illegal as it gets.
*Having* a monopoly is not illegal, unless you got it in an illegal manner. The original microsoft mnopoly was lawfully acquired by most counts, and owes more to IBM pricing CP/M-86 at four times the price of PC-DOS than to anything Microsoft did.
However, having legally acquired a monopoly, it is illegal to use market power for just about anything. ANd one does not have to be a monopolist to reach this prohibition, but merely to have market power. Here (again, assuming that it is true), they attempted to use a near-monopoly to eliminate a competitor. This creates two great sins against anti-trust law: 1) the use of the power, and 2) it is an *attempt* to monopolize, an offense on its own.
It is possible to make economic arguments that what MS has done is good for the consumer, and that the law *should* permit the alleged behavior. THere have been several of these as op-ed pieces in the wall street journal over the past few months, and generally rely on the notion that microsoft is innovative.
I haven't been persuaded by the arguments, but they can be honestly made. However, that is not what the law *is*. While antitrust law gives the courts far more flexibility than just about any other statutory law, and modern antitrust law acknowledges consumer interest rather than protection of competitors as the ultimate test, the definitions needed to permit the alleged behavior not only bend the meaning of the statutes, but requires that they be outright ignored.
To extend this analogy, go back further, to when the ibm pc was new. Microsoft *was* the good guy, who was going to save us from the dominion of IBM.
Microsoft sold MS-DOS for other computers, so that you could run man (later almost all) of the programs for the IBM on other 8086 hardware. In 1982, it was ibm that was seen as the dark side.
IBM *expected* you to buy ibm software to run on that pc, and only ibm hardware--though they couldn't force you. We had a *wall* full of ibm software for it, but I don't remember ever selling a single copy of it (mainly because it wasn't any good).
With MS-DOS, though, you were safe, and could by someone else's hardware. In 1982, this didn't mean a clone, either. There were several other 8086 machines out there. And the 640k limit was peculiar to ibm (and the clones); iirc, Victor could access 768k.
But along the way, things changed. Someone through young Microft through a Window, disfiguring it horribly, and creating the dreaded Micrso~1 . . .
Now we see the emperor, err, ibm, coming to our rescue to protect us from microso~1 . . .
>But wouldn't it just be like having offspring
>when one is older in life.
That's the crux of it, I think. Where I see the problem is that that 70 year old started out with "correct" material to form the gametes, and "corrects" to that. But the clone doesn't get that, so do the sexual organs correct to the right value, or do the correct to what they started with?
The article claims that she started with over-aged cells, and thus "inherits" this agge, but that her offspring would be normal. But would they? This would require some type of "repair" of here gametes, as her ovaries will have been formed from the wrong "age" of cells. Even presuming something about ovaries and testes that avoids the general agin effect, might this only fix cells to the age of those (normally a couple of days) forming the organs?
>As of last friday, I noticed that posts starting
>at higher than one was still happening.
The post to which you were replying, for example, was up to 5 in less than 5 minuts, I believe.
we still have the problem with the path. If I have a connection from San Jose to Reno, it's not relevant to Atlanta to Charleston traffic. However, if I have electricty in San Jose, I can feed it to the grid, allowing more to be drawn off in Charleston.
We can still define it as a commodity, but it's a much "tighter" definition than we'd like to use.
Gas is nice & loose: 1000 cubic feet by friday. It can be stored if necessary
Electricty gets tighter; while gas at 2pm and 3pm are close to fungible (interchangable & indistinguishable), electricty at 2pm friday and 3pm friday are distinct products. Still, since there's a huge grid to work with, and we can push the electricty back and forth, the market can work.
But bandwidth is an issue of San Jose to Reno at 2pm. While there are limits on how much each path can carry for electricity, the power itself is the dominant factor. But with bandwidth, it's that ability to carry that's the issue. I could route traffic from San Jose to Atlanta to Charleston and back to Reno, but it's hard for that connection to compete with a direct one.
is what I see as the real problem. The rest gets computationally expensive, but workable. But you still have a single connection to the pool, and are stuck with that monopoly, which can collect the economic rents that the ISP might have in the past. I don't see this as solving the issue, just partially mitigating it--and adding the complexity that you descrbie (quite well, I might add) as an additional cost.
Not all of them, but the bulk of tehm. And you described exactly the reasons that catholics & noncatholics alike took pay cuts to teach at my jesuit high school.